Year: 2024

As underdog hunters, we have been excited to watch college football’s championship morph into a playoff system, because with seeds come officially designated Davids and Goliaths, and with brackets come chances for meaningful upsets. Well, that was our theory, anyway. The way this inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff has panned out, Boise State and Arizona […]

Within the past year, Paige Bueckers has expanded the scope of what it means to be a college athlete. She played in a Final Four but also became an equity partner in Unrivaled, designed her own player-edition sneaker for Nike and appeared courtside throughout the country at various sporting events. In the new name, image and […]

He was a teenager on the books at Arsenal when Stephen Bradley nearly died in late 2003.  “Within a minute of coming home, the door was getting kicked in. They put a gun to my head. One was saying: ‘Shoot him, shoot him.’ And the other stabbed me; three times. That’s all I remember.” The […]

It was only six months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when, on a balmy September evening in eastern Germany, I came across Mykhailo Mudryk shortly after midnight. This was September 2022 and Mudryk was by then an emerging talent for the Ukrainian champions, Shakhtar Donetsk. He scored and was the team’s major attacking threat in […]

The memo from Norby Williamson, one of ESPN’s top executives, was short and direct: Lee Fitting, a senior vice president of production who had been at ESPN for more than 25 years, was “no longer with the company” and ESPN would be “finalizing a new production structure” for the shows he oversaw. The timing of […]

LAS VEGAS — Prior to checking out for good, $514,971 richer and another MVP award bound for his trophy case, Giannis Antetokounmpo closed off a drive from Kenrich Williams. He met the Oklahoma City Thunder forward at the rim, blocking the sneak attempt at a layup. The ensuing transition featured Giannis two-handing a pass ahead […]

No Iowa women’s basketball player will wear No. 22 again. That is because, on Feb. 2, the Hawkeyes will retire Caitlin Clark’s jersey during an in-arena ceremony as Iowa takes on USC at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. Over her four years with the program, Clark rewrote both the Iowa and NCAA record books. Last winter, she became […]

What’s the right moment to hitch your hopes to an up-and-coming tennis player? People were having visions of Carlos Alcaraz’s future when he was 10, the age at which Babolat and the other big racket companies sometimes start handing out equipment and swag. At France’s Les Petit As, the premier tournament for juniors 14-and-under, any […]

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — In October, before Kim Caldwell had coached a game for Tennessee, she sat on an orange couch in her office and tried to get comfortable. This was both a physical and philosophical challenge for the first-year Lady Volunteers coach at the time. At five months pregnant with her first child, there were […]

Trade details: New York Yankees acquire OF/1B Cody Bellinger and cash considerations from the Chicago Cubs for RHP Cody Poteet The Yankees needed another bat after the departure of Juan Soto, and they got one on the cheap, so to speak, trading a replacement-level arm to the Cubs and taking on about 90 percent of […]